District 9

Remember Mos Espa? What a fucking joke. You might recall some scenes that were set in Mos Espa, but you don't recall the place because, by failure of production design, it never existed. Not the way Mos Eisley exists: a fully realized and distinct locale, living as vividly in my memory as any place I've actually visited. That wretched hive of so-and-so is a character, and now an aesthetically-mindful South African/Kiwi enterprise has made for it a sister.

The alien refugee camp and surrounding slums of District 9 would be right at home on the outskirts of the Dune Sea, where the future crash landed into the Third World. The invaluable wreckage is a carcass thrown to wild dogs, a grisly tug-of-war between the desperate untouchables, tribal warlords, the imperial garrison, and a rogue's gallery of smugglers, mercenaries and covetous bureaucrats. What fun!

The movie works because it is built on a foundation of visual authenticity. The CGI elements are judiciously integrated into a grimily real environment — lovingly littered with tangible junk, reminding me of how the tireless model builders glued together zillions of assorted airplane model parts to create the cobbled-industrial surface of the Death Star. All the disparate visual elements, from the abundance of skinless cow heads to the holographic ship controls to the hard plastic MNU body armor, from the office desk interviews to the badass mech warrior to the prawns themselves — their nauseous hatchery shacks and improvised derelicte fashions — seamlessly coexist on screen, equally matter-of-fact.